Abstract
John Wheeler coined the phrase “it from bit” or “bit from it” in the 1980s. However, much of the interest in the connection between information, i.e. “bits”, and physical objects, i.e. “its”, stems from the discovery that black holes have characteristics of thermodynamic systems having entropies and temperatures. This insight led to the information loss problem—what happens to the “bits” when the black hole has evaporated away due to the energy loss from Hawking radiation? In this essay we speculate on a radical answer to this question using the assumption of self-similarity of quantum correction to the gravitational action and the requirement that the quantum corrected entropy be well behaved in the limit when the black hole mass goes to zero.
Published in JHEP 1405:074 (2014).
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Notes
- 1.
There is an equivalence or connection between information, entropy and bits and we will use these terms somewhat interchangeably throughout this essay. A nice overview of the close relationship between information, entropy and bits can be found in reference [1].
- 2.
Broadly speaking, self-similarity means that a system “looks the same” at different scales. A standard example is the Koch snowflake [5] where any small segment of the curve has the same shape as a larger segment. Here, self-similarity is applied in the sense that as one goes to smaller distance scales/higher energy scales by going to successive orders in \(\hbar \) that the form of the quantum corrections remains the same.
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Singleton, D., Vagenas, E.C., Zhu, T. (2015). Self-similarity, Conservation of Entropy/bits and the Black Hole Information Puzzle. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) It From Bit or Bit From It?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12946-4_11
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